OS 4.0 Requirements

[GadgetMaster]

@Downix

I have a feeling you knew exactly what I meant and you are purposely being pedantic just to keep this conversation lively.

I have no qualms with that so I won't bother rephrasing my statement. ;-)

[downix]

@gadgetMaster

Actually I'm being honest.  I do all "real OS" stuff with the above mentioned OS's, and do it well.

They do the job excellently.

[itix]

I think you should have 128MB or at least 64MB. 32MB is not enough IMO.

You probably have gfx board that can do true color graphics eating lot of RAM. Decoding buffers for AmiNetRadio can easily eat few megs. PPC binaries are approximately twice as large and you need som (probably lot) RAM for JIT too.

32MB could work if you have fast HD for swapping! :-)

[DaBest]

I can just FELL THE LOVE in this room  :-D  :-D  :-D  :-D

[Revener]

Windows 3.1 and lesser were 16 bit just like DOS but provided multitasking

It did not provide multitasking, it was taskswitching :-)

[Calen]

Whatever it's final minimum memory requirements are for the A1/OS4 which i assume would be anything from 16 to 64mb, give it at least 256mb and let the multitasking fun begin.

I personaly would probably give it 512mb (seems overkill in Amiga land but it's cheap) so i know i will never run out and could run as many apps at once i could possibly ever need. I could do this on os3.9 with 64mb very easily but i'm allowing alittle extra for OS4 :-)

[samo79]

An AmigaOne G3 700 with 64MB, or an Amiga classic with PPC, if Hyperion work fine, i think an Amiga classic  PPC 603 with 32MB

[star1]

I thaught OS4.0 was fast low-mem footprint os , then how is 32 or 128MB low footprint?

How are they gone market OS 4.0 in the embedded area when Qnx does everthing on one floppy disk with low mem and os 4.0 stands there with 32mb??

[Floid]

downix wrote:
@GadgetMaster

Ahem, I run OpenBSD on 4MB fine.

I'm sure it runs fine, but you must've really enjoyed installing it.  Are we talking i386?

[Rodney]

When i got my Openbsd 2.9 machine, i believe the bare minimum for OpenbSD with Xwindows was 16M... or , actualy i could have been 8 ...

OpenBSD rox for memory and of course security. Its far better in both regards compared to linux.

I also sure its kernel is far lighter weight. I remember when i ran BSD with 64M of ram, at login i'd have 54M free... Custome kernels rock too im obssessed with customising kernels, i love it... nothing better to get the performance you need...

Which makes me wonder, i'd love to do something similar with AmigaOS if i'd ever get it or windows. But with both of those, you'r never going to get the source... do you think that maybe the kernels could support loadable modules and a configuration tool could be used to select the ones we want?

for example, if we know we're not going to be useing USB or some other devices that requires drivers untill we actualy get some hardware to use it with, we should be able to disable and no load it... is this possible currently? and if not, could loadable module support be included in execSG?

sorry for beign off topic

[that_punk_guy]

It would be cool if Windows 2000 got open-sourced.

Not likely, of course  :-D

[Floid]

star1 wrote:
I thaught OS4.0 was fast low-mem footprint os , then how is 32 or 128MB low footprint?

How are they gone market OS 4.0 in the embedded area when Qnx does everthing on one floppy disk with low mem and os 4.0 stands there with 32mb??

QNX doesn't do the impossible with low mem.  I forget the requirements for the demo disk, but they must've been at least 8MB, and it's no longer offered.

From the download page, the current suggestions for what was the RtP (now "Momentics NC"?) are
'400 MHz Pentium or better, 128M RAM , 1.0 G disk space.'  I ran it on a Pentium 133, and managed to chop the system image (forgetting my terminology here... the nifty little filesystem-in-a-file that keeps your array of microkernel daemons or whatever as 'portable' as a monolithic kernel) down enough to survive in 32MB, but as soon as you want a desktop background, use of the Flash plugin, or a few pieces of useful software open... you're going to crave more memory.

Point is, you can make it quite small if you have a specific purpose in mind, and QSSL have certainly done a good job of making that process easy, but a 32MB requirement isn't that unusual for a general-purpose OS that won't use shared memory at every stage of the game.

Think about it... even something as 'simple' as a web browser really *is* more complex than the average arcade game - you can make a lithe one, but you don't get the benefit of being able to, say, pack all your graphics in some proprietary hyper-compressed format you've invented for the purpose and tuned for your particular title.

[ple3003]

How much mem is needed to run it??- hopefully not
like WindosXp with 128MB

Did you by any chance notice, the first time you installed at tcp/ip stack like Miami, that all of yar 2 mb chipmem seemed to disappear somewhere, leaving you with like 150kb left to run a textbrowser such as Lynx? You know that's what happens, when things (as in computers and their functions) evolve and get even more advanced. They consume more resources and that is completely normal if you wan't to do more stuff with 'em.

No 'modern' OS that would perfom efficiently with Just 4MB of RAM

well said. unless you enjoy null-modem networks (oh man, the transfer speeds are brutal!) or like to have a desktop with fewer colors (like 8 color desktop) coz more bitplanes eat more memory. That's just the way it is!!!

Then there are OS:es such as windows. they like memory a lot. they eat it and do nothing of it. bloated code and so on... (bla bla)

Do remember: OS4 "needing" more memory than 3.1 is not a bad thing. That depends on what it should be able to do....

[tekmage]

I think 32 is a good number to start with, I'd recommend 64 megs or more for decent performance, the extra room is good for all the little 68k tasks to be happy.  I'll also point out that a blank bootable partition will also be needed to get OS 4 running.  Given the amount of change between OS 3.X and OS 4 and most of the "hacks" we know and love so much being redundant starting fresh might be our only option.


Bill "tekmage" Borsari

[CodeSmith]

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned this - the biggest memory hog on OS4 (and I bet it is on MOS too) will most probably be the native code caches for the 68K JIT translators.  The bigger the caches, the more the JIT benefits.

[olegil]

Amiga OS is low footprint, but if you're thinking of running large m68k applications emulated you'll need more memory than on a classic machine. Due to the way the emulation works.

Can you even BUY less than 128MB sticks nowadays? (I know SIMMS for CSPPC and BPPC are generally a bit smaller, but remember that on these systems you could dual boot with 3.9 to run old applications without emulation).

It's also expected that you'll be working with higher resolutions in all your programs, and with larger documents. I mean, you can easily play videos on the CPU power in an AmigaOne or a CSPPC, so why wouldn't you? This means you'll need some memory as well.

But a MINIMUM requirement to run OS4 without any JIT emulation should be somewhere around 8MB. On a 320x200 8 bit screen ;-) (most people don't actually know how much memory screens take up. Try to calculate memory for 32 bit graphics in your preferred screensize and you'll see that 32MB won't last for many applications at all... 1600x1200 takes up 7.5MB of memory)